Where to park a bike in Martinez, and what the county will pay for

Martinez publishes a map of where to lock a bike downtown. Two things are worth knowing about it before you plan a trip around it: it holds 16 points, and the city last edited it in December 2024.

The map sits on the city's bicycles page, under the heading for where to park your bike in Martinez. The city's description of its own cycling runs to one sentence — Martinez "is a bike-friendly destination, with bicycle lanes and bicycle racks found in various areas of the City" — and the page sends riders to county route-planning tools rather than listing rack locations in text. The map carries no names, addresses or capacities, just points, clustered downtown and along the waterfront between roughly Ferry Street and the Regional Shoreline.

The money and the free help are at the county end, through 511 Contra Costa, a program of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority.

For riders, there is a $150 rebate for county residents who buy an e-bike, a conversion kit or an electric moped, and up to $300 for residents with low household incomes. The program also runs the Bike Mapper route planner, BikeLink lockers, a Guaranteed Ride Home for people who biked to work and then needed to get home fast, and a Summer Bike Challenge across all 19 cities in the county.

For anyone who owns or manages a building — and this is the part most Main Street businesses do not know — 511 Contra Costa says its staff "can also provide bike rack and locker consultations to help make worksites more bike friendly," for employment sites, retail centers, schools, colleges and public buildings. It starts with a request form on the program's site.

What the county has in the pipeline for Martinez is mostly lanes and trails, not parking. The authority's countywide bicycle and pedestrian plan project list, last updated March 14, 2025, carries nine Martinez projects. Among them: closing the San Francisco Bay Trail gap from the existing staging area east along the south edge of the Martinez Regional Shoreline to the Shoreline Trail near Ferry Street; a later phase adding a bicycle and pedestrian bridge over the Union Pacific tracks at North Court Street, landing at the Escobar and Court street intersection downtown; bike lanes on North Court Street connecting the Martinez Intermodal Facility to Shoreline Park and a future ferry terminal; bike lanes on Pacheco Boulevard between Arnold Drive and Muir Road; and a paved trail on the west side of Reliez Valley Road from Blue Ridge Drive to Tavan Estates Drive. The Howe Street bike lanes are listed as finished in the summer of 2023.

Not one of the nine is a bike-parking project.

The station itself may get the most change. The transportation authority is planning a shared mobility hub at the Martinez Amtrak station, gathered public feedback on design concepts in spring 2025, and says the site has funding and is moving into environmental clearance and engineering.

To ask about a rack at a specific address, the city's Engineering Division is at (925) 372-3515 and engineering@cityofmartinez.org. Requests for a rack or locker at a business or school go through the 511 Contra Costa form.